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Cultural Trauma: Emotion and Narration

Ron Eyerman
The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology
Edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ronald N. Jacobs, and Philip Smith

Print Publication Date: Feb 2012 Subject: Sociology Online Publication Date: Jun 2017
10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195377767.013.21

View PDF Go to page: GO

Abstract and Keywords

This article examines the theory of cultural trauma and contrasts it to the classical notion of trauma by
considering the case of political assassination. The idea of cultural trauma was first developed at Stanford
University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. The theory of cultural trauma has evolved
into a core research interest and framework under the rubric of cultural sociology. After discussing the main
assumptions of classical trauma theory, the article explains what a traumatic occurrence is. It then explores the
meaning of cultural trauma by taking into account Neil Smelser’s definition and concludes by articulating the
objectives of cultural trauma as a theoretical construct.

Keywords: cultural trauma, trauma, political assassination, cultural sociology, classical trauma theory, traumatic
occurrence, Neil Smelser

THIS chapter will elaborate the theory of cultural trauma by contrasting it to the classical notion of trauma and
illustrating the similarities and differences of these terms in a discussion of political assassination. The latter is
based on research I’m currently doing concerning the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968), Robert
Kennedy (1968), and Harvey Milk (1978) in the United States; Olof Palme (1986) and Anna Lindh (2003) in
Sweden; and Pim Fortuyn (2002) and Theo van Gogh (2004) in the Netherlands. The idea of cultural trauma
was first developed during a year-long sojourn at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences. The results of these seminars and discussions were compiled as distinctive, research-
based essays in the volume Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (California 2004) collectively edited by
Jeffrey Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, all of whom had worked
together for that year. The theory of cultural trauma has evolved into a core research interest and framework
under the rubric of cultural sociology, and several works have been published, including Giesen 2004; Eyerman
2001, 2008 and 2011; Goodman 2009; and Eyerman, Alexander, and Breese 2011.

Classical Trauma Theory

The word “trauma” stems from the ancient Greek, meaning “wound,” and came to be applied to surgical wounds,
“conceived on the model of a rupture of the skin or protective envelope of the body resulting in a catastrophic
global reaction in the (p. 565) entire organism” (Leys 2000:19). In the late nineteenth century, the term was
reinvented for use in the treatment of the aftereffects of railway accidents (see Leys 2000 for one genealogy of
the term's meaning and usage, and Fassin and Rechtman 2009 for another). However, in contemporary medical,
psychiatric, and literary usage, “The term trauma is understood as a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon
the mind.” The wound is inflicted by a shock so powerful that it breaches “the mind's experience of time, self and
the world,” eventually manifesting itself in dreams and flashbacks (Caruth 1996:3–4).1 In the same tradition,
Geoffrey Hartman (1996:159) defines trauma as “events or states of feeling that threaten” the limits of
experience and that “puncture lived time and exist only as phantasms.” For Dominick LaCapra (2004:61),
“Trauma is a shattering experience that distorts memory … and may render it particularly vulnerable and fallible
in the reporting of events.” In this conception, an occurrence is traumatic not simply because it is forceful, but
because it is unthinkable, in that it “resists simple comprehension”(Caruth 1996:6) and cannot be easily
assimilated into already established frameworks of understanding. Trauma is an experience so powerful that it
cannot be understood as it occurs, but must be recalled and reconstructed from the deep recesses of memory
(Freud 1990; Breuer and Freud 1957). When describing their real-time experience of the murder of Swedish
Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, both the country's prime minister and the chief investigating police officer said it felt
“unreal” (overklig). Sirhan Sirhan, a perpetrator not a victim, claimed to have a memory blackout during the
shooting of Robert Kennedy (apparently not unusual in violent crimes), and witnesses to that occurrence
reported that things seemed to move in slow motion and be out of time.

The perceived unreality of an occurrence is part of what is meant by shock, a numbing of the senses and an
inability to accept or take in what has, in fact, happened. There is also a probable mixing of “this has not
happened” and “this cannot happen,” as well as “this cannot happen here.” The latter was part of the collective
shock experienced in both Sweden and the Netherlands, where political murder and violence were rare. Such
experience is usually relatively short-lived, as the possibility of denial fades and “reality” forces itself onto
individual and collective consciousness. However, for some victims of shocking experience, the aftereffects
never fade and continue to haunt the memory and behavior of those affected. Newspaper accounts following the
murders of John Kennedy and Olof Palme report a “stunned” nation, and the banner headline of the San
Francisco Chronicle following the murder of the city's mayor and Harvey Milk, a member of the governing board,
proclaimed, “The City Weeps.” Such collective attributions may be difficult to scientifically maintain, but they are
easy to understand and accept. Public opinion surveys taken after such occurrences confirm this. A survey of
contemporary reactions to the assassination of American president John Kennedy (1963) showed that: 79
percent of those interviewed felt they had lost a dear and close friend; 73 percent said they were angry that such
a thing could happen; 83 percent felt ashamed that such a thing could happen in the United States; 53 percent
acknowledged they had cried upon hearing the news; and 97 percent reported they thought about the hurt
inflicted on the victim's family (data provided by R.S. Sigel in Sigel, ed. Learning (p. 566) about Politics 1970,
cited in Åsard 2006:103–104; see also Bonjean et al. 1965). Public reaction to the Palme murder was
comparable: 90 percent reported feeling upset that such a thing could happen in Sweden; 84 percent could not
believe it; 82 percent felt angry that such a thing could happen in Sweden; 80 percent contemplated the hurt
inflicted on the family, and as many felt sad. Forty-two percent felt as if they had lost a close friend (Bonjean et
al. 1965:170). While these reactions and statistics might not represent “the nation,” they do reflect a shared
sense of shock. Erikson (1978) reports similar collective shock in his study of the aftermath of the flood at Buffalo
Creek for which he uses the term “collective trauma” and proposes that “trauma can create community,” just as a
shocking occurrence can destroy it (Erikson 1995:185). Those who experienced and survived the flood felt only
those with similar experience could truly understand them.

Such natural disasters can provide an occasion for affected collectivities to reflect on themselves in another
sense. Along with its devastation, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 revealed aspects of the United States that were well
hidden from many of its citizens. That poor people existed, and that many of them were black, were probably
well known, but the powerful winds that battered New Orleans and pierced its levees, causing millions to flee
their homes, exposed this reality in an unprecedented way. Who will forget the images of families stranded on
roof tops and on highway overpasses waiting for days for help to arrive? Not only did this mediatized event bring
the issue of race and poverty forcefully to collective awareness, the victims—who they were, how they should be
labeled (were they refugees?), and how they were treated—became cause for national debate. This public
discourse raised not only the issue of responsibility but also the broader one of “what type of society we are,” in
which such a tragedy could happen. This is one indicator of cultural trauma: An emerging broad public discourse
in which collective foundations are opened for reflection.

Political assassinations are similar in that they can bring to the surface aspects of a society that normally lie
deeply hidden and that they can be a catalyst for broad public debate. One major difference between
assassinations and natural disaster equates to a difference between a so-called force of nature and the human
hand (see White 2008 for a related discussion concerning event and fact). The issue of human responsibility
was raised in regard to Hurricane Katrina, both in relation to the construction of the levee system that was meant
to protect the city of New Orleans and in the response of political authorities to the disaster. But the main cause,
the forceful winds, were largely seen as lying outside human control. I say “largely” because an argument can be
made that some of the blame for that extraordinarily powerful hurricane may lie in what has been called global
warming, the causes of which lie in human actions and decisions.

In the shock they evoke, natural disasters and political assassinations raise the question “why has this happened
to us?” They have the capacity to awaken a sense of collective belonging, to create a “we,” while at the same
time raising questions about the grounds on which that collectivity rests. Such occurrences not only raise the
issue of “why has this happened to us?” but also “who or what was responsible?” (p. 567) The religious might see
an act of God, a sign, or a punishment in such an occurrence. For the secular, natural disasters are just that,
natural, something inflicted by forces outside human control. From this perspective, while we might be able to
track their path or even make predictions about their likely occurrence, natural phenomena, like hurricanes and
earthquakes, are not interpreted as the direct result of human action. Political assassinations on the other hand
are the result of human actions: There is no one and nothing else to blame. The question “why has this
happened to us?” which implies a collectivity—an “us”—also involves the search for those responsible. It is here
that what I will call traumatic occurrences align with cultural trauma, as will be described and discussed in the
following section. Attributing blame, settling on who is responsible, is a central part of the process of cultural
trauma; and in political assassination, as opposed to natural disasters, the responsible party is a human agent.
The process of reforming a collectivity, of bringing it to consciousness, and of naming the outside other that is
responsible is a political process. What would more likely turn such a traumatic occurrence into a cultural trauma
would be if the responsible party was someone inside the collective. The point I wish to make here is that for the
analyst, political assassinations provide a unique opportunity to study the foundations of collective identity, as
well as those of collective memory that are intimately intertwined. This has been a central issue in sociological
thought since its origins in the nineteenth century.

According to Fassin and Rechtman (2009:30), it was London doctors treating the effects of railroad accidents in
the late 1860s who “opened the path to trauma psychiatry.” While Freud and Breuer first associated trauma with
sexual fantasy and to what they labeled hysteric response, restricting its application to women (Leys 2000).
Freud later expanded this notion to the affects of industrial and transportation accidents and elaborated these
reflections in connection with the treatment of the victims of trench warfare during the First World War, even
appearing as an expert witness in a famous court case against an eminent psychiatrist (Eissler 1986; see also
Fassin and Rechtman 2009:52). This expanded the sources of trauma and the affected group to include men,
though it still limited the term to the effects on combatants that were then primarily men. This conception of
wartime trauma has now been expanded to include noncombatants, such as nurses and relatives of victims,
most especially mothers (see Higonnet 2002). Trauma as applied here makes reference to a real occurrence, a
physical blow that overwhelms the senses and against which the mind and body must defend itself. In addition to
numbness—a condition where the capacity to feel pain is temporarily suspended—amnesia is another defense
mechanism of the mind. The victim simply forgets or denies that anything has occurred. In developing a dynamic
model, Freud called this the period of latency, where in this state of denial or protective forgetting, the trauma
victim can appear quite normal in carrying out everyday routines. In this model, there is no exact time frame for
this period. Iit could last for days or years, but the experience will at some point reemerge and manifest itself
either in nightmares or some otherwise inexplicable, abnormal behavior. Freud's notion of trauma, while leaving
open the question of direct experience and clearly identifiable victims, is firmly (p. 568) rooted at the individual
level. For later theorists in this tradition, however, Auschwitz and Hiroshima fully disclosed the catastrophic
potential of modernity, including not only bureaucratic rationality, but also faith in science and technology:
Trauma and modernity were thus intimately linked in a much more general and abstract way (Horkheimer and
Adorno 2002; Bauman 1989; Kaplan 2005; Caruth (1996); and LaCapra 2001.2 From this perspective, one of the
manifestations of a catastrophic age is taken to be the insufficiency of word and narrative to capture the affect of
traumatic experience. Insufficient or even illegitimate as it may be, there has been an array of theoretical
reflections around the idea of traumatic experience and traumatic memory (LaCapra (2001; White 2004 e.g.).

Contemporary revisions of the classical notion of trauma focus on two aspects: first, the traumatic affects on the
victim, the recurrent unwanted intrusion of memory and its effect on behavior; and second, the call of attention to
the limits of representation or rather as Caruth (1995) expresses it, the “impossibility” of memory and the specific
kind of repressed experience that becomes available not only to the therapist but also to the theorist. Trauma, in
other words, opens up a hidden world to the observer and, in this tragic sense, creates an opportunity to see
what would otherwise remain deeply buried. In this sense, trauma at the individual level resembles crisis at the
societal level. A crisis, such as a severe economic depression or a natural disaster, is a shocking occurrence
that can cause a breakdown in daily routines and expose, at the same time, the largely taken-for-granted values
that guide them: Crises, in this sense, reveal to a collective, the grounds of its collective identity (Habermas
1975).3 Like individual trauma, a societal crisis is both a shock and an opportunity, revealing and making
available for reflection what otherwise remains deeply hidden. At the collective level, such trauma can be
inclusive as well as exclusive, and old collectivities can be reaffirmed, as well as new ones created.

Traumatic Occurrence
What is a traumatic occurrence? A traumatic occurrence is one that leaves those who experience it, directly or
indirectly, with long-standing memory traces which affect not only emotional life, but also behavior in unexpected
and uncontrollable ways. More importantly, in our context, however, a traumatic occurrence creates a
biographical and historical watershed—as sense of before and after—that can shape individual memory and
create a group consciousness, as Erikson has shown and as Karl Mannheim (1967) suggested with his notion of
generational consciousness. One can distinguish individual and collective trauma, as well as gradations and
levels with respect to traumatic occurrences, according to nearness to the actual situation, for example, being in
the pantry room at the Ambassador Hotel during the shooting of Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) left a very deep,
emotional impression on those there, but also effected great collective emotion as well. A sense of intimacy
(p. 569) with the victim would also affect the force of the trauma, even if one was not actually present. Göran

Persson, the Swedish prime minister, was a close friend of Anna Lindh, so close, that five years later he reported
still having her phone number prerecorded in his cell phone. Although not actually present at the scene of her
murder, he remains deeply affected by her death. Similarly, one of the state prosecutors involved in the Lindh
investigation reported feelings of great uneasiness when meeting the press, feelings she traced back to her work
on the Palme investigation; the memory of that failure had set itself in her body. A third category could be
identification with the person or with what the person represented. Upon hearing the announcement of Lindh's
death, members of the working press and police corps openly wept. Photographer Bill Eppridge (2008) reports
snapping photos as tears ran over his face, as he took pictures of mourners as the funeral train carrying the
body of RFK moved from New York to Washington, DC. He and a colleague were so struck by Kennedy's
murder that they refused to take a photograph of his casket being lowered into the ground, as if they could not,
and would not, accept what had happened. There is another category that could be added: those occurrences
that are remembered as traumatic, but not necessarily experienced. We will touch on this issue later on.

The reactions of these professionals to political assassination point to different types of shock and trauma—for
individuals and for collectivities. The murders of RFK and Anna Lindh were similar in the sense that both were
representative political figures, but not heads of their respective nations. Both were perhaps on their way to this
position, and their deaths were similarly shocking in that respect. Reactions to their deaths evoked great
collective sadness, as well as shock, a sense of loss, and thoughts about what could have been had they lived.
These strong emotions left long-standing memory traces for their respective nations. We can say this with surety
with reference to RFK, as forty years have passed, and the affects are still present and discussed. However,
direct collective emotional reaction to these deaths varied. Though some feared that violence would erupt in the
wake of Kennedy's death, none did. No one expected violence in the aftermath of Lindh's death. Great waves of
violence erupted after the announcement of Martin Luther King's death and, on a much lesser scale, that of Theo
van Gogh. Though neither was an elected official, both King and van Gogh were representative public figures,
nonetheless, and both identified partisan constituencies who felt they were affected by this death. The death of
Pim Fortuyn evoked strong displays of collective emotion, as his supporters blamed both the opposing political
parties and the mass media for his murder. Immediately following Fortuyn's death, there were massive
demonstrations, but few incidents of violence. Fortuyn was the leader of an opposition party and an anti-
establishment movement; and even though he might very well have been elected prime minister in the coming
election, he did not represent the nation, neither in the sence of some fundamental values nor as a formally
elected political authority, in the same way as Lindh or Robert Kennedy. Nonetheless, Fortuyn's death set the
stage for the violent reaction that would follow the assassination of his friend,Theo van Gogh thirty months later
(Eyerman 2008).

(p. 570) Cultural Trauma

In an insightful discussion of the difference between psychological and cultural trauma, Neil Smelser (2004) finds
one essential difference in the fact that cultural traumas are made, not born. He goes on to define cultural
trauma as “an invasive and overwhelming event that is believed to undermine or overwhelm one or several
essential ingredients of a culture or the culture as a whole” (Smelser in Alexander et al. 2004:38). Though
acknowledging the discursive aspect of cultural trauma, Smelser grounds the process in an event. I think,
however, that the key phrase here is “believed to undermine,” a notion which undercuts any idea that an event
could be traumatic in itself. This opens two vital questions: (1) Can any occurrence or event be made traumatic?
(i.e., so that it is “believed to undermine” an established collective identity); and (2) if not, what is it that permits
some occurrences to become traumatic in this sense and not other seemingly equally powerful or shocking
occurrences to become traumatic? The first question points to the power to create belief. A radical social
constructivist might argue that given the ultimate power to persuade could turn any occurrence into a “trauma.”4
This would be to push the idea that “traumas are made not born” to its limits. At the other extreme, a strong
naturalist or lay trauma account (Alexander 2004) would make the claim that certain events are traumatic in
themselves, that is, be the direct cause of traumatic affect. Elsewhere (Eyerman 2001, 2008), I have made the
case for a middle position that argues certain occurrences—in our current example, political assassinations—
may create conditions conducive to setting in motion a process of cultural trauma, without being traumatic in
themselves. This will not happen without the aid of meaning-making forces, such as mass media and certain
carrier groups (Alexander 2004) like intellectuals, who influence the formation and direction of a process of
cultural trauma.5 However, not all or any interpretative frame will “fit” or make sense. There must be some
relation, real or perceived, to some referent, an occurrence, experience or event, which itself appears “always
there.”

Cultural traumas are not things, but processes of meaning-making and attribution, a contentious contest in which
various individuals and groups struggle to define a situation and to manage and control it. I would add that these
forces are unlikely to create a trauma out of nothing; there is likely to be some powerful, shocking occurrence
that creates the possibility, providing the opportunity to mobilize opinions and emotions.6 There are thus two
sides to a cultural trauma—an emotional experience and an interpretative reaction. Shocks arouse emotion by
breaking everyday routines (behaviors as well as cognitive frameworks) and, as such, demand interpretation,
opening a discursive field where well-placed individuals can play a determinate role. In modern societies, access
to mass media is significant in this interpretative and representational process. The usually asymmetrical polarity
between perpetrator and victim is what distinguishes cultural trauma as discourse. In this sense, cultural trauma
is a contentious, discursive process, framed (p. 571) by a dichotomy between perpetrator and victim, that is
spurred by a powerful, unforgettable occurrence, even one occurring in the distant past. Neil Smelser (2004:44)
formalizes cultural trauma in this way: “A memory accepted and publically given credence by a relevant
membership group and evoking an event or situation which is a) laden with negative affect, b) represented as
indelible, and c) regarded as threatening a society's existence or violating one or more of its fundamental cultural
presuppositions.” This implies that an established collective identity is shaken and its foundations called into
question. Cultural trauma is a discursive process where the emotions that are triggered by a traumatic
occurrence are worked through, and an attempt is made to heal a collective wound (Erikson 1995). There is no
guarantee, however, that healing or repair will be successful.

Cultural traumas are thus more than discursive struggles between competing individual and collective actors to
define a situation, distinguish perpetrator and victim, and identify the nature of the pain. That would limit the
process to instrumental or strategic interaction that could be analyzed through a discourse analysis, similar to
that employed in frame analysis. Cultural traumas reflect deeply felt emotions and identities that are publicly
expressed and represented in this discursive process, implying an expressive and communicative dimension
that makes claims to authenticity and sincerity. The veracity of such claims must be addressed; something which
points beyond traditional discourse analysis. More than that, as discursive process, resulting from extreme
violence and exposing the deep emotional base that grounds individual and collective, cultural trauma is both an
articulation/representation of this emotional grounding and at the same time a working-through, a searching
attempt at collective repair. Such a process is certainly open to strategic attempts to “define the situation” and to
manipulation by agents and entrepreneurs, but it cannot be reduced to them or to this. Anything connected to
identity falls within the realm of the sacred (Giesen 2004) and as such is bound up with powerful emotions, such
as dignity, envy, shame, self-confidence, and assurance. There are deeply rooted emotions and scripted
identities drawn upon in cultural trauma—ethnic or national identities, for example—that may lie under the
surface of everyday interactions but also may be mobilized in the face of a shocking occurrence, such as a
political assassination. This was the case with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 that spiraled
into a war which fundamentally altered the political geography of Europe. In this sense, a cultural trauma is a
meaning-struggle emerging out of current or recalled shocking occurrences where collective identities, as well as
collective memories, are at stake (Eyerman 2001).

Smelser (2004:37–38) makes another distinction—usefully illustrated through political assassination—between

social and cultural trauma. While a cultural trauma invokes public discourse on the fundaments of an established
collective identity, social trauma refers to “strains on institutions” and “disruptions of social life.” Smelser's
example of cultural trauma is the Protestant Reformation, which posed a successful “fundamental threat to the
dominant Catholic world view” (2004:38). Social trauma refers to a process similar in form to cultural trauma, but
delimited to particular institutions or groups in a society rather than to the social (p. 572) whole. Smelser's
example of social trauma is the Great Depression, which impacted the lives of most Americans but never
appeared to threaten their fundamental values or beliefs, though there were of course organizations and
movements that sought to make that happen. There is, thus, an element of mediation, success, and failure in the
relation between social and cultural trauma in Smelser's account. Shocking events like political assassinations
may appear to shake an entire nation, but the long term effects may be more strongly felt and lasting within
specific institutions or by particular groups. Two examples should illustrate this. The murder of Olof Palme in
Sweden shocked the nation in a powerful way, but its long-term effects appear to be most strongly felt in the
Social Democratic Party and in the police corps—institutions that were most directly affected. The murder, and
its representation, also affected journalism and the mass media; and Swedish journalism—that includes radio as
a central feature—was fundamentally altered after the Palme murder. This event remains a prime reference
point in the education of journalists.7 Similarly, the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) in the United States
was shocking. It was called a national tragedy. Though felt most powerfully among African Americans, MLK has
since become an icon of the “American experience,” and a national holiday, celebrating his birth not his death, is
commemorated annually.

We can now return to the question of how it is that a collective comes to believe that an occurrence
“overwhelms” their already established collective identity. Collective identities are rooted in beliefs that are
maintained in everyday life through routine practices. Routines provide confirmation and security in that they
allow beliefs to be taken for granted and to be, in a sense, forgotten. An example may help illustrate what I
mean. One of the first public statements made by the Swedish Prime Minister after the death of Anna Lindh was,
“This is an attack on our democratic society.” That Sweden is a democratic society is a fundamental belief and a
value grounding modern Swedish collective identity. This belief is not only taught in schools but is also bound up
in routine practices, like voting every three years to elect the government. The fact that Sweden is a “democracy”
is normally taken for granted. The murder of Anna Lindh was shocking, not only because she was a well-known
member of the collective, but also because she was a political figure, a representative of that democratic
process. At least for the prime minister, another representative figure, her murder presented a threat to that
fundamental value/identity, as well as to the political process that underpins it. It was thus important for the
security and the stability of that identity, not only that the murderer be caught—which was a police matter—but
also that the rules and procedures of the political system that would guarantee stability were immediately put on
display. This was even clearer in the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme, where the same radio bulletin which
announced the murder to the public also confirmed that the government was already meeting to ensure the
succession of his replacement. Since shocking events like political assassinations break everyday routines and
can call into question fundamental taken-for-granted beliefs, it is, thus, important that those in positions of
authority act quickly to reaffirm those basic identities. (p. 573) To act in this manner is one way of assuring, or
attempting to ensure, that the shock caused by political assassination will be contained and limited to an
institution or set of institutions—in this case, that of politics and law enforcement—and not involve the society at
large. Not to do so, or if such performances of authority fail, extends the risk that a social trauma will become a
cultural trauma.

This allows us to make use of one more idea in Smelser's discussion of cultural trauma, that of shocking
occurrences as being “potentially” traumatic which must be successfully “endowed with negative affect” in order
to be fully realized. Central in the meaning-struggle—and, thus, to the making of a cultural trauma—is the
successful attribution of terms like “national tragedy,” “national shame,” and “national catastrophe” and their
acceptance by a significant part of the collective. This is what is meant by the phrase, come to “believe to
undermine,” where a significant number—who can say how many—members of a collective come to believe that
the shock is a “national tragedy” that undermines the fundamental values which have defined the collective. This
is what turns or transforms a shock into a cultural trauma and leads to Smelser's more formal definition: “A
cultural trauma is a memory accepted or given credence by a relevant membership group and evoking an event
or situation which is a) laden with negative affect, b) represented as indelible, and 3) regarded as threatening a
society's existence or violating one or more of its fundamental cultural pre-suppositions” (Smelser 2004:44).
Even when speaking of a collective, one must ask, “trauma for whom?” (Giesen 2004, Eyerman 2008).
Imaginary collectivities, like nations or ethnic groups, are rarely unified or univocal. One effect of a traumatic
occurrence can be to provide a sense of coherence and collectivity, even if this is also imaginary and temporary,
as Erikson suggested. The attack on New York's World Trade Center in 2001 appeared to unify the American
nation into an emotional collective, producing ritual practices that helped sustain it, just as the phrase “9/11” is
meant to evoke and signify shared experience and collective understanding. But digging beneath that ephemeral
surface, in large part facilitated through mass-mediated representations, one would undoubtedly find individuals,
and even groups, who would dissent in that feeling. In this sense, a traumatic occurrence has the potential to
both unify and divide, to create insiders and outsiders. This potential must however be realized, and it is here
that what Alexander (2004:11)—following Max Weber—called “carrier groups” play an important role. Such
groups articulate and represent trauma, making it available for communication and shared understanding. They
help transform emotional response into words and images that can be dispersed and remembered. Artists,
writers, journalists, and political and religious leaders are important social categories in this articulation and play
an important role in the trauma process, but the idea of carrier groups is broader than these professional
categories. Carrier groups can be preexisting or form in response to a particular traumatic occurrence, while
professional categories, such as those mentioned, may be significant agents within them. For example, the
murder of Pim Fortuyn was clearly traumatic for his followers, and this group played an important role in turning
that occurrence into a national event. However, the media in general, and journalists in particular, also (p. 574)

played an indispensible role in that process, whatever their feelings toward Fortuyn. Many have noted that both
the rise and fall of Fortuyn were strongly influenced by the mass media. In fact, at the mass demonstrations that
followed his death, one of the slogans repeated over and over by his supporters was that he was, in fact,
murdered by the mass media, even if the actual killer was a lone individual already in custody (Faber 2008).

Carrier groups not only are central to the making of cultural trauma, they are important in its continued affect.
Carrier groups are bearers of memory. As mentioned, the groups most affected in the long term by the murder of
Olof Palme were the Swedish Social Democratic Party and the Swedish police corps. The murder of Anna Lindh
seventeen years later brought the memory of Palme's murder directly to life for both groups. The reactions of the
police to Lindh's murder was determined to a great extent by their sense of failure regarding Palme's murder,
and the Social Democratic Party was viscerally reminded of the loss of their exulted leader when Foreign
Minister Anna Lindh, also a party member, died. Cultural trauma in this sense refers to a process through which
collectivities are articulated, formed, and reformed in the light of traumatic occurrences like political
assassinations. Shocking occurrences and traumatic events need not only have negative outcomes for all
concerned. The failed assassination attempt on American President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981, just
sixty-nine days into his presidency, actually served to strengthen his public image and gave him more political
capital. He was able to push through his political platform with greater ease.

Carrier groups include collective actors placed under broad-umbrella concepts, such as the “mass media.” In a
remarkable passage written soon after the assassination of John F. Kennedy (JFK), Theodore White, an
American journalist responsible for a series of firsthand accounts of “the making of the president,” described the
power of television in helping to create a sense of collective belonging that would become part of the myth and
legend of collective memory:

The spectacle of the next three days is so new to memory that to retell it falls impossibly short of still-
fresh emotions. What will be difficult for historians to grasp, however, was that the ceremonies that
followed were more than spectacle—they were a political and psychological event of measureless
dimension. And in this event the chief servant was American television, performing duties of journalism
with supreme excellence. Within minutes of the shot, American television was already mobilizing. In
 half an hour all commercial programs had been wiped from the air, and thereafter, abandoning all cost
accounting, television proceeded to unify the nation …. The political result of this participation, of this
national lament, was a psychological event which no practical politician will ever be able to ignore ….
The drama gave all people a sense of identification, and translated the majesty of leadership into an
intimate simplicity of Biblical nature. There was in the drama of the four days all things to bind men—a
hero, slain; a sorrowing wife; a stricken mother and family; and two enchanting children. So broad was
the emotional span, embracing every member of every family from schoolchild to grandparent, that it
made the grief of the Kennedys a common grief.

(White 1965:13–14)

(p. 575) What then is the relation between shocking occurrences and cultural trauma? An attempt at a schematic
diagram would look like this: shocking occurrence; traumatic event (mass media); attempts at management and
repair (performing authorities); cultural trauma (carrier groups); and collective memory. This could be called a
weak social constructivist viewpoint, something that I have more fully developed in two books (Eyerman 2001,
2008). As previously mentioned, cultural trauma is a historically bound and produced narrative in which the
positions of the perpetrator and victim are central. It emerges in the context of shocking occurrences and carries
the notion that “we are not the same” after such an occurrence. In this sense, periodization—as sense of before
and after—is as central to the trauma narrative as perpetrators and victims. In political assassinations, there are
at least two victims, the murdered individual and the collective that associates itself with that individual. Carrier
groups articulate the significance of this occurrence for the collective, and to the extent they are successful, the
occurrence becomes a vital part of that group's collective memory. Wider than this however, the polarity between
perpetrator and victim is encased within a culturally specific, normative framework wherein, for example, but not
necessarily, perpetrators are represented as evil and tainted, where victims are good and innocent. In some
cases, such as that of Anna Lindh, perpetrators can also be represented as victims. The framing of victim and
perpetrator is part of the meaning-struggle in the trauma process. The specific content of this normative
framework varies according to the historical narratives which define the parameters of national identity. In the
Netherlands, for example, the Second World War marked a significant turning point in defining what it meant to
be Dutch (Eyerman 2008). The surprisingly quick defeat of the Dutch army, and the occupation of the country by
the Germans, provided a newly refined moral framework for what was good and evil, with good being associated
with a rather ambiguous loyalty to the exiled House of Orange and evil with ideology of the occupier, Nazism, in
particular, and fascism, more generally. This framework helped shape public discourse both before and after the
murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh., and it provided, to an extent at least, the framework through which
the murders were interpreted. For those on the political left, as the charismatic leader of a social movement,
Fortuyn represented a revitalized fascism; while Theo van Gogh heard the thumping of black boots when he
looked at Muslims. Both these victims of assassination claimed to be defending the innocent Dutch from
impending evil. The portrayal of the perpetrator in each case varied significantly. While it was not difficult to paint
the killer of Theo van Gogh as the epitome of evil, it was more difficult in the case of the solidly Dutchman who
murdered Fortuyn.

Another “root narrative” (Wagner-Pacifici (1986), through which these occurrences were filtered, was that of the
right to free speech and expression, a discourse which took new form in the 1960s. As representative figures of
that expressive and self-centered generation, Van Gogh and Fortuyn both claimed the right to publically say
what they felt and to live their lives accordingly, no matter what others might think or do. The right to free
expression and to choose one's “life style” (p. 576) provided a principled standpoint around which many diverse
individuals could collectively rally in the aftermath of these murders.
Their respective killers also interpreted their actions through a normative, moral framework. Volkert van der
Graaf viewed his victim as representing an evil that threatened the foundations of a just and caring Dutch
society, just as Mohammed Bouyeri saw in Theo van Gogh all the evil that was Western civilization. From the
point of view of the established order, one dimension of the cultural trauma process is the potential rupture and
the attempts to maintain and repair such a moral framework. If the killer of Pim Fortuyn had turned out to be the
Muslim extremist as many anticipated, this would have confirmed and reinforced some established notions of
good and evil. When it turned out that the killer was a rather ordinary Dutchman, the affect was confusion and
the search for explanation. That he could be labeled an “animal-rights activist” provided some consolation. This
labeling of the perpetrator as an extremist also reaffirmed the claim that this was a political assassination,
something which became a centerpiece at the perpetrator's trial.

It is possible to construct a schematic like the following where the crossing of two lines define a field of traumatic
and nontraumatic political assassinations:

Victims
Good/Evil
Perpetrators

As defined by an assumed consensus, the persons killed in my examples all fall within the space where victims
were represented as good and the perpetrators as evil. One can think of other cases where the opposite is true,
where the the victim was portrayed as evil and the perpetrators portrayed as good, such as that of the Black
Panther leader Bobby Hutton killed by the police two days after Martin Luther King, a killing viewed by some as
an assassination. This labeling would presumably play a role in any trauma process and shape the possibility of
an emergent cultural trauma.

Pointing to the moral framework highlights the cultural aspects that condition the emergence of cultural trauma.
Asking the question “under what conditions does a traumatic occurrence like political assassination evolve into
cultural trauma”; to use concepts like “carrier groups”; and to scrutinize how well legitimate authority manages
this occurrence, is to follow a well-established explanatory path best laid out by Max Weber in his comparative
studies of the emergence of modern capitalism. Adding a moral framework adds a specifically cultural dimension
to this explanation. A factor, or to use traditional language, variables determining what does or does not become
a cultural trauma are the specific cultural structures, the moral framework defining good and evil, and the
grounding myths of the nation present in any society at a given time. These help define what are understood as
threats to the collective and give political assassinations some of their force. This is another way of saying that
our emotional reactions, even those to shocking occurrences, are necessarily filtered through an already existing
and readily available cultural framework. This includes reactions to assassinations. One of the central cultural
discourses (p. 577) grounding the self-understanding of modern democracies is that of being civilized, not
primitive—a notion which encompasses reactions to acts of violence, even those which may threaten national
stability. Assassinations and assassins must thus be treated in way that conforms to this notion, which explains
why one of the acts of established authority is the call for calm and “reasoned” response. Political assassinations
are almost by definition potentially traumatic far beyond the experience of those present, but if a perpetrator can
be defined as a mentally unstable, lone individual, some of the force of that potential is mitigated. The event can
then be more easily stabilized and contained as shocking and traumatic for a time and even included in the
collective memory, but will not have the long-term negative impact of a cultural trauma.

Cultural traumas can only be known and studied retrospectively. It is only after the passing of time—how much
exactly is uncertain—that we can know if the affect of a traumatic occurrence is still felt, still alive. In this sense,
cultural trauma resembles the trauma experienced by individuals, and its effects remain under the surface and
become visible, are revealed, sometimes long after the fact. As it is currently reinterpreted, trauma disrupts
narrative (LaCapra 2001; Caruth 1996) in the sense that it ruptures the flow of everyday experience. Here,
trauma lies outside existing narrative, awaiting its formal representation. More broadly, trauma has also been
linked to modernity (Kaplan 2005) and to the modern experience of time. The modern experience of time is that
of a constant and continual flow moving irrevocably forward, as in the expressions, “time moves on” and “time
heals all wounds.” Trauma in this view is out of time, a break in this flow, and is at once symptom and cause.
Trauma presupposes this view of time in order for it to be experienced as interrupted, broken, and shattered.
Trauma is experienced through symptoms, the involuntary reactions to a past event, and an acting out that
requires working-through. In this sense, trauma is always already there, awaiting representation.

Cultural trauma implies something different. For cultural trauma theory, trauma emerges through narration,
through argumentation and counter argumentation, which gives form to its emotional content. This discursive
process, a trauma drama, makes visible, articulates, and gives meaning and words to what is strongly felt but
not grasped. Trauma is named and given voice through the ongoing public dialogue or meaning-struggle. It does
not exist as a thing-in-itself, but only comes to be through dialogue and narration. This process or trauma drama
is at one and the same time an acting out (in both a psychological and social sense) and a working-through. It is
also a process in which the mass media play a leading role, both in terms of articulating and representing and in
the healing and working-through. The media can orchestrate—being a prime and self-interested agent—as well
as a forceful agent in the process of social repair.

Finally, the theory of cultural trauma provides a framework of analysis, a heuristic device constructed by the
social theorist as a tool to retrospectively map a discursive process. Here, the theory becomes a model through
which one can organize historical and empirical material in a structured and coherent way, allowing one to make
sense of seemingly disparate occurrences through a coherent narrative. (p. 578) As a framework of analysis,
cultural trauma allows one to study the struggle to come to grips with traumatic occurrences, to locate the central
actors in this meaning-struggle, and to trace the process over long periods of time. In my study, the role of the
memory of slavery in the formation of African American identity (Eyerman 2001), for example, I was able to trace
this process over several generations, and Rui Gao and Ivana Spasic (both in Eyerman et al 2011.) were able to
map the “trauma narratives” in Mao's China and in Serbia, respectively. In such accounts, the relation to the
actual experience of “traumatic occurrences” or even their existence may be contested. In fact, the phrase
“chosen trauma” has been coined in reference to the transgenerational transmission of national or large-group
identities of this sort (Volkan 2001). Still the issue of the veracity of these narratives and their relation to actual
events and experience can be addressed. Foundational narratives of collective identity, such as that described
by Eyerman, Gao, and Spasic mentioned above, are often rooted in a traumatic occurrence that forms the primal
scene of the group's identity where there is an affinity to myth. But even foundational narratives—whether we
view them as myths, ideologies, or narrated collective memory—must “fit” the changing world in which a
collective finds itself. In this sense, they open themselves for reflection and for criticism. In addition to this,
traumatic occurrences, like political assassinations, can open such foundational narratives to critical reflection,
creating a crisis of identity as well as opening a meaning-struggle to define the situation. In such a situation, as
happened in the United States after a series of assassinations in the 1960s, the older, established narrative is
called into question and claimed to be “mistaken,” if not “false,” on the basis of now problematized taken-for-
granted truth claims. In this sense, “the sixties” can be described as a cultural trauma, where the foundations of
the collective, the meaning of being an American, were exposed and fought over in a trauma drama which may
still be ongoing.

Let me conclude on a methodological note. Cultural trauma is a theoretical construct, a heuristic that permits us
to set borders around an occurrence that reaches back into the past and forward into the future. The aim is to
make deeply buried, culture structures available to the analyst. Like the frame around a painting, the theory of
cultural trauma allows us to mark off a historical process, to distinguish foreground and background, and to
highlight specific features. Unlike the construction of a theoretical model, the aim is not to construct hypotheses
but to uncover layers of meaning that help us gain a deeper understanding of significance and consequence.
The theory of cultural trauma permits one to analyze the mediatized process from occurrence to event (Mast
2006). Occurrences, even relatively rare ones like political assassinations, become events through mediated
representations, whereby they are reconstructed as broadly significant and meaningful. This process of event-
making necessarily involves conflicting interpretations and the attempt by various agents and agencies to define
the situation in a particular way and from a particular perspective. Not all occurrences become an event, but
traumatic occurrences, like political assassinations, clearly have that potential. Turning an occurrence into an
event involves a struggle to affix meaning. As a meta-theoretical framework of interpretation, and as a middle-
range framework of analysis, cultural (p. 579) trauma allows one to highlight these meaning-struggles, while at
the same time making possible a multilayered analysis of the entire process, including the “meaning” of the
event-making process itself. In this analysis, individual responses to, and mediated representations of, powerful,
event-generating occurrences are interpreted in the light of scripted frameworks and internalized as collective
representations, sediments of individual and collective memory. This permits not only the identification of key
agents in the struggle to affix and stabilize meaning but also allows the identification of significant collective
processes. Analyzing the process of event-making helps make visible deeply rooted collective representations
that in turn may aid in explaining why the occurrence is powerful or contains the traumatizing potential that it
does. The aim of such analysis is at one and the same time to identify the agents and the scripted
representaitons and to articulate the deep structure of collective representation.

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Notes:
(1.) The views expressed by Caruth are strongly criticized by Leys in her account of the geneology of trauma.
For a defense of Caruth against Leys, see Felman 2002.

(2.) It is possible, I think, to say that certain books by Adorno, Bauman, and Freud were written in connection to
working-through personal trauma.

(3.) Jurgen Habermas opens Legitimation Crisis (1975) with a discussion of the concept crisis, making clear the
difference between the term's medical, aesthetic, and social scientific uses. In its medical usage, he associates
crisis with the “idea of an objective force that deprives a subject of some part of his normal sovereignty … in
classical aesthetics … crisis signifies the turning point in a fateful process that, despite all objectivity, does not
simply impose itself from outside and does not remain external to the identity of the persons caught up in it”
(Habermas 1975:1–2). Habermas then goes on to develop a social scientific notion of crisis which takes its
starting point in systems theory, where “crisis states assume the form of a disintegration of social institutions”
and threatens collective identity. He makes the claim that “social systems too have identities and can lose them”
(Habermas 1975:3), creating conditions in which a complex process of unfolding can spiral and threaten a social
system to its core. Looked at in this sophisticated sense, and of course as common sense, crisis may well be a
term which could be applied to the aftermath of political assassinations. Indeed, there are similarities in
Habermas’ use of crisis and my use of cultural trauma. Against an objective notion of crisis used in the medical
sciences, which are similar to the medical use of trauma, Habermas argues that crises must be interpreted and
understood as such. They must in other words be narrated to be understood as crises. This is also characteristic
of cultural trauma, which, in one of its applications, can be defined as a public discourse in which the foundations
upon which a collective identity rests are opened for reflection and debate. Both concepts make reference to a
shattering of everyday routine and the taken-for-granted assumptions that guide them. Cultural trauma is a form
of collective identity crisis, in which an established collectivity loses the secure sense of itself and seems to be
adrift, existing in that liminal space Durkheim called anomie. Cultural trauma differs from crisis not only in that
the foundations of a collective identity are threatened, thus engaging the social whole, and not only one or
several institutions (see Smelser on the difference between a social and cultural trauma), but also with regard to
longevity and long-term affect. Cultural traumas can be passed across generations, with their affect preserved in
individual and collective memory, only to emerge in later generations in what could be called post-crisis
symptoms. The deeply felt sense of crisis analyzed by Habermas might also evoke strong emotional response.
Such emotional content is absent, however, or rarely mentioned in his account. The economic crises of the
1930s left deep scars and had long-term affects on the generation that experienced it, such as the mistrust in
banks and in the credit system. Narrated as the “Great Depression,” an economic crisis became a cultural
trauma, affecting the way individual citizens and national leaders would react to seemingly similar crises, where
deeply hidden anxieties could trigger seemingly irrational or impulse responses, as well as rational reflection and
contextual comparison. Think, for example, of the world financial crisis of 2008, where immediate comparison to
the Great Depression was drawn or denied. Crises can develop into cultural traumas through a meaning-
struggle in which perpetrators and victims are named and asymmetrically positioned. Trauma requires narration
of a specific kind, one in which neither irony nor humor is possible: the shock to the system is experienced as
too great. Like crises, trauma produces a loss of confidence, in the world, in the individual, and for the nation.
The assassinations of King and Kennedy helped produced such a loss in the United States, which came to final
fruition in the loss of the Vietnam War. The reaction of 9/11 can perhaps be understood with reference to that, an
acting out of repressed traumatic memory. Cultural traumas are as much about acting out as working-through,
two key notions in the classical notion of trauma.

(4.) This is a different way of speaking about “radical constructivism” than LaCapra (2001:8) who uses it in the
context of the line between history writing and fiction. In his sense, those—like Hayden White who argue that on
the formal level there is no fundamental difference between writing history and writing fiction because both
necessarily make use of narration—are radical constructivists.

(5.) A parallel might well be the Marxian idea of class consciousness and the distinction between class-in-itself
and class-for-itself.

(6.) There is a growing literature on imagined and invented trauma. The former is rooted in the classical notion of
trauma and concerns victims of trauma, such as childhood abuse where the child may misremember or block out
information (see, e.g., Freyd 1997). At the opposite end, this category might also include those false memories
and memoires of the Holocaust which have been written. Invented or mythical trauma can be found in the
attempts by various individuals or social movements to ground a collective identity, such as in Serbian
nationalism (Ivana Spasic, in Eyerman et al 2011.). Varnik Volkan (2001) prefers to speak of “chosen trauma”
when discussing the collective identity of large groups, like ethnic, national, and religious groups. In his usage “a
chosen trauma refers to the shared mental representation of a massive trauma that the group's ancestors
suffered at the hand of an enemy” (2001:79). Since this “trauma” is most likely to have occurred long in the past,
presumably no one recalling it was its direct victim, but rather a trauma narrative is constructed which defines the
self-understanding of the group. In this sense, the trauma is chosen or imagined, but it is no less real for that.

(7.) Zelizer (1992:4) writes similarly of American journalism after the assassination of John Kennedy: “It was a
turning point in the evolution of American journalistic practice not only because it called for the rapid relay of
information during a time of crisis, but also because it legitimated televised journalism as a mediator of national
public experience.”

Ron Eyerman

Ron Eyerman is Professor of Sociology and a Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale
University. His areas of research include social theory, trauma and memory and he has taught
undergraduate and graduate classes and seminars on these topics. Recent books include The
Assassination of Theo van Gogh and The Trauma of Political Assassination.
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